How I ended up on my path

The year before last I began researching information about hereditary/natural witches for a novel. I wanted to write a novel based on a real life experience, or three, from my childhood–the novel would be fiction but based on a few things I’d seen first hand as a child. Because of those the things I’d seen I knew that there were unseen things, unexplainable things, supernatural things and I wanted to write a book about a woman who was in her mid-thirties and had been born into a long line of hereditary witches but she just wanted to be “normal.” She’d moved away from college and had only been home to visit over the holidays–her normal life didn’t include Sabbats, Esbats, spells, rituals, or circles. She spent her adult life debunking the supernatural–for example, proving that that house that someone claimed was haunted was a hoax, or the psychic on stage was a fake–as a journalist for a paranormal magazine it was her job to expose the charlatan’s. EVERYTHING in her life changes when her grandmother, who is head of her coven, is murdered by another witch and she (my MC) goes back home for her grandmother’s funeral. She and her twin brother, along with two of their cousins, settle their grandmother’s estate, and decide to find the murderer, as well as justice for their grandmother’s death. Throw in a family curse (my family was cursed, according to my own grandmother and several family relatives, many generations back), a good guy who isn’t really a good guy, a bad guy who is almost likeable, and a really bad guy, along with the hero’s journey, and a ghost or three and Wa La I have a paranormal novel that I’m not the only one who will want to read.

In order to write the novel I had to do research. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) was fast approaching and I needed a basic outline. In order to have a decent basic outline I needed to understand more about witchcraft and what witches do.

The more I researched the more I realized that I recognized that some of the things I’d seen, heard, and experienced were something more than what I’d originally thought they were. When I saw my (paternal) grandmother heal the warts off of my cousin’s hands, when I saw and talked with ghosts when I was young (still see them and talk to them), when I’d watched my grandmother burn incense and listen to Celtic music, when I’d witnessed her refuse to talk about the healing’s I’d witnessed with my own eyes, or her family or her childhood, and my own mother’s psychic dream premonitions, or my aunts’ premonitions… The list goes on…I realized these things were “of the supernatural,” and “cunningfolk like.” Was my grandmother a “wise woman?” Does being psychic mean you’re a witch? Do you have to be psychic to be a witch? What is a witch? What do witches do? The questions turned into more questions, until one day I realized I wasn’t just doing research…

I’d found my path. My spiritual path. I felt at home with Paganism/Witchcraft/Wicca. I felt like I’d finally come home.

In August of this year I started my One Year and A Day studies officially. Though I’d been reading and researching for well over a year before that, I wanted to officially begin my path. I’m so glad I did.